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How Macron and Trump changed politics

The newly elected French and American presidents have each destroyed the myth of the indestructibility of their nation’s leading political parties.

Students take a selfie photo with French President Emmanuel Macron during his visit to the Vaseix agricultural college in Verneuil-sur-Vienne on Friday. (PASCAL LACHENAUD / AFP/GETTY IMAGES)

By Robin V. Sears

Sun., June 11, 2017

As offended as each man would be by the comparison, Emmanuel Macron and Donald Trump are the yin and yang of a fascinating new political phenomenon. Each has overturned their political establishments to the horror of veteran politicians and pundits on all sides.

France has had a conservative/socialist bipartisan political culture since the decline of euro-communism more than 40 years ago. In less than two years Macron has built a political movement that straddles that divide, and got elected president. It now appears he may seize control of the French Parliament this month.

This is a simply breathtaking achievement, not seen in Western Europe since the dark days a century ago when a very different set of upstarts smashed the political elites.

Critics may cavil about how much real change Macron actually delivers. He may indeed become a French Tony Blair with a similarly mixed legacy, but that’s not the point. How did a 39-year-old former junior politician win name recognition with four out of five French voters and build a dominant political machine in less than two years, overturning the French Socialist Party, the two French conservative parties, and Ms. LePen, too boot?

One need only look at the United States a year earlier to see the same phenomenon, from a much darker part of the political spectrum. A combination of evangelists, nativist Americans and alt-right anti-Semitic activists, deployed the high-octane propaganda accelerant that is bot-driven social media, to propel a sleazy reality TV star into the lead in the GOP primary race. The rest is, as they say, history; a slow-motion tragedy undermining the very pillars of American democracy.

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What could such different insurgents possibly have in common? They each destroyed the myth of the indestructibility of their nation’s leading political parties.

The Republicans, Democrats, French Socialists and conservatives have straddled their respective democracies as all powerful partisan giants for more than a century. The revelation that they each had become brittle shells of their former selves, dominated by a small elite of paid professionals, alienated from their own voters, is the most astonishing takeaway of the past 18 months.

No partisan in any democracy should ignore the painful lesson in this, including Liberals, New Democrats, and Conservatives. The hollowing out of political parties across the Western democracies has been underway for two decades at least.

Getting 150,000 people to pay $10 to vote in a leadership contest — or nothing at all if you want to choose Justin Trudeau’s successor — is not a pledge to devote your time, money and dedication over many years to a political party. It’s a “low touch” engagement, as the social media experts term it: fleeting, low risk, and as bankable as a weather forecast.

There is a parallel phenomenon just over the Canadian political horizon: the fracturing of the political spectrum into smaller political parties. Opponents of electoral reform always denounce its inevitable destruction of a stable three party system into squabbling fragments.

Except that now, in the Mother of Parliaments, the original first-past-the-post voting system, following this week’s election, sit MPs from 10, count ’em 10, political parties; far more than Germany or Italy — the nations usually derided by anti-reform dinosaurs as proof of the foolishness of proportional representation.

But every democracy, irrespective of voting system, is beginning to see its party structure fracture as well, with regionalist, green hard right and hard left, anti-immigrant and anti-Islamic parties eating into the base of all the traditional political parties.

Whether you see this as a bad or a good development — greater instability versus greater choice and accountability — is not what should concern partisans of existing parties. What they should worry about are their vulnerabilities, the internal unseen rot that makes poaching possible.

It is not email blasts, or media profile that cements partisan loyalty and commitment. And it is most certainly not the volume of pleading fundraising messages pushed out endlessly on social media. You are not competing with upstart new political parties alone, you are fighting for a slice of rare time and attention against Greenpeace, voters’ kids’ sports teams, and couch potato time.

Party organizers need to make participating in a riding meeting matter, to make their appeals for political support authentic and personally relevant, to respond respectfully to criticism and pledge to never waste an intelligent millennial’s time enduring boring boilerplate speeches by visiting politicians.

I don’t know of a Canadian political party that could meet those tests today.

Robin V. Sears, a principal at Earnscliffe Strategy Group and a Broadbent Institute leadership fellow, was an NDP strategist for 20 years.

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